Have race relations seriously improved or degraded since Obama took office?

Great Debates
1

I recently saw a news story about a Hollywood producer who was mistaken for a bank robber and was arrested and allegedly treated rather badly by the Bev Hills police.

The description of the bank robber was a tall black man and this producer was a tall black man. According to the following news story:

“Within an evening, I was wrongly arrested, locked up, denied a phone call, denied explanation of charges against me, denied ever being read my rights, denied being able to speak to my lawyer for a lengthy time, and denied being told that my car had been impounded,” Belk wrote. “All because I was mis-indentified as the wrong ‘tall, bald head, black male,’ … ‘fitting the description.'”

The thing about this story that really surprised (even shocked) me was that there were a huge number of comments by the public and they all seemed to be by white people saying openly hostile racist things about black people as well as black people saying openly hostile racist things about white people. I just couldn’t believe there was so much hatred for people of different races and almost no attempt for any reconciliation or any discussion of the wrongs done to Mr. Belk by the police. I was shocked there were no comments about that.

I hope you will take a minute or so and read some of these comments. Seems to me they could quite easily have been written in the 1920s or 1930s. I was very disheartened to realize they were all written in 2014.

The reason I am posting about this in Great Debates is to ask the following question:

Have race relations seriously improved or degraded since Obama took office?

I want to pose this question because one of the public comments claimed that race relations have seriously degraded since Obama took office.

I am not very political and I don’t usually pay hardly any attention to politics. I don’t like Obama and never have. I consider him to be rather weak and ineffectual. But I can’t believe that anything he has done has seriously degraded race relations in America. If it’s true that race relations have indeed degraded, I can’t see how that can be blamed on Obama.

A second issue that really bothered me is that I was once arrested for a bogus reason and spent a few hours in jail. The case was quickly dismissed and I never even had to plead. But that experience made me aware of just how easy it is for someone to be deprived of their freedom and civil rights for some completely bogus reason.

Prior to being arrested, I had never imagined that could ever happen to me and I just went through life with the stupid belief that the police are our friends and we should always co-operate with the police and answer any questions they asked under all circumstances. I now see that as a very stupid assumption and one that can easily get people into big, big trouble very easily.

I could see myself in this man’s place - wrongly arrested, locked up, denied a phone call, denied explanation of charges against me, denied being able to speak to my lawyer for a lengthy time. I was read my rights. However, I think this man (Charles Belk) is completely correct that the way the police operate needs to be changed. There is something very wrong with what happened to him and it’s very wrong that it could happen to any of us - regardless of race. Although, to be fair, it seems very clear to me this sort of thing is much more likely to happen to black people.

The one thing that really frosts me about this incident is that the police could have simply made a phone call or two and they would have learned quite clearly they had the wrong man. It frosts me because the system expended far more resources in falsely detaining this man than it would have expended in making a brief investigation and quickly releasing him.

I hope Mr. Belk sues the police for big money and that he gets that money. At present, that seems to me to be the single most effective way to force change on the police.

I also hope you will take a look at some of the public comments following this news story. I found them to be very disappointing and indeed quite scary. Where are race relations headed and why is there almost no visible efforts being made to help improve them? Everywhere I see, race relations are currently just getting worse.

It’s true there have been many forward movements since the abolition of slavery. But all those improvements happened long ago and recently I can’t see hardly any efforts towards improvements.

2

This just in - people are idiots, and Obama hasn’t changed this. Are your children at risk?

Film at 11.

I’m no fan of Obama, but I’m not going to be surprised if some TV producer goes ballistic for being arrested for being 51 years old, tall. black, and bald, while the actual guy they are looking for is 47 years old, tall, black, and bald. In Beverly Hils. And then people post many proofs in the Comments section that they haven’t seen any of Eddie Murphy’s early movies.

Living in post-racial America does not mean living in post-stupid America, unfortunately.

Regards,
Shodan

3

I definitely think that one story proves… what exactly?

Oh, it’s about comments to the news story? On… the internet? Why, I’m shocked, shocked!! that people post crazy stuff on the internet.

BTW, just so you know “go read a bunch of these comments and tell me what you think” is not considered good form for an OP around these parts.

4

Mr. Belk was not guilty, clearly, but I believe he had unreasonable expectations about the process he was unfortunately caught up in. Some might call it Hollywood expectations which is apt as Belk is a TV producer.

Belk was detained on suspicion of being involved in a bank robbery. The description of the suspect officers had to work on was a 1)tall 2)black 3)bald 4)man 5)wearing a green shirt. And Belk matched all five points. Lousy coincidence.

Further a witness to the robbery positively (but incorrectly, as we now know) identified Belk as being involved in the robbery. Belk was detained within a block of the robbery within minutes after it happened. Can’t really fault police for detaining him.

But Belk’s expectation is that police should have stopped everything the moment they detained him and go view the surveillance tapes. His expectation was it should take no more than 10 minutes. That’s not how it works.

Of course the police are going to take anyone arrested under such circumstances to the station, fingerprint them, and tow their car to check it for evidence. Meanwhile they will also gather other evidence including the surveillance tapes from the bank and statements from witnesses. That takes some time.

And when Belk’s unrealistic expectations were not met, he played the race card. And the media are eating it up.

Yeah, race relations have not gotten any better under Obama. And I’m not so sure that Obama hasn’t contributed to a worsening of race relations with comments he has made in certain legal cases where he criticized police actions and intimated racial bias where there may have been none.

5

No. I think Obama’s election has made some of the racial divisions in the U.S. more obvious because over the last couple of decades our society has decided these issues are depressing and the best way to deal with them is to to pretend they don’t exist. There are at least some issues where he’s working on the problem, so there’s that. But this is a very broad problem and it’s hard to get society in general to acknowledge that it exists and needs to change.

There’s no such place as post-racial America. It’s a fiction, and if you believed in it in early 2009, it should’ve become apparent quite a while ago that it’s not real.

Nothing, really. At best it’s typical of a larger problem that has just about nothing to do with Obama.

6

I think people practice “group racism”. That is, they apply broad, negative, stereotypes to an entire group that they never would to a single individual of that group. Which is why you see soooo many ugly, negative comments on anonymous comment boards that you couldn’t even imagine a person saying in person.

And no, it has nothing to do with Obama being president. The only difference with having a Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown incident with another, WHITE, president is that he/she wouldn’t have to walk the tightrope that Obama does when commenting on it. I REALLY don’t envy the guy when these black/white incidents come up.

7

If the story is true as described, then the really troubling part is that he was denied his phone call and contact with his lawyer.

8

That’s regular racism. It’s pretty standard; this is the reason people say “some of my best friends are black!” The idea is that because the speaker likes some specific black people he/she knows personally, he or she couldn’t possibly have prejudiced ideas about black people in general. Not that you can’t distinguish between different types of racist actions, but this is not unusual in any way.

They do say these kinds of things in person- but only when they’re pretty confident they have a sympathetic audience.

9

Thank you very much for your post, Iggy. I want to thank you now because I don’t think this thread will be going too much further and I can understand why that is.

I found your post to be informative. I hadn’t previously considered that it really is unreasonable to expect the police to change the way they do things and do things the way Mr. Belk wanted them to so that he could be released quickly. There were other factors involved and I hadn’t previously considered that.

I also found your post to be thought provoking - at least for me. I have to wonder just how much of a part the media are playing in this affair and whether they are driving the story or they are following the story.

But once again, I want to say, “Good post and thank you.”

Thanks to the other people who replied as well. For some reason Iggy’s post just seemed to resonate with me.

As far as John Mace’s point that people post crazy stuff on the Internet, it seems to me he is saying that the opinions expressed by these anonymous people should be heavily discounted. I’m just not sure that is so. I think their opinions deserve a little more consideration than that. But I don’t know how much more.

10

Here is an excellent bit from Jon Stewart from last night(?) talking about race in the US and how it seems to be handled…

Less than ten minutes long. Well worth a watch: - YouTube

11

Maybe someone has changed his mind since 2004.

There is never going to be a post-racial America where black people don’t ascribe to racism what is largely caused by something else, as in the case of this silly TV producer threatening to sue because the police noticed that he matched a description. Or an America where equally dimwitted people post idiotic comments about how black people smell bad. But that’s just background noise, and Obama can’t do anything about that.

Nor should he be expected to. The left is going to label it racist when somebody calls Obama a liar, and the right is going to say the same when Obama criticizes the police for busting Gates (although, to Obama’s credit, he later recognized that he was helping rachet up the situation and didn’t mean to malign the police in saying they had acted stupidly). But those kind of hair-trigger reactions in the news media (and on the SDMB) aren’t reflective of any general trends one way or the other.

Regards,
Shodan

12

Wait – so this film producer who is complaining about being mistaken for a criminal is “equally dimwitted” to those disgustingly racist internet posters? Do you really believe these two things are comparable?

13

Can you quote Obama actually saying America is post-racial? I’m pretty sure he’s never said anything such thing, both because it would be stupid and politically unwise. This is a quote from 2004; the purported “post-racial era” is generally supposed to have began when he was elected president.

I agree. If the country ever becomes something like post-racial, it’ll be when black people no longer suffer from widespread poverty, unequal policing, disproportionate criminal sentencing, job discrimination, and on and on.

I mentioned this earlier. An individual arrest - justified or not - doesn’t speak to the problem, which has little to do with Obama in any case.

14

I just watched a documentary about Fannie Lou Hamer last night. This is a woman who worked on a cotton plantation in Mississippi, whose life was repeatedly threatened for registering to vote, who was fired from her job from registering to vote, who was arrested and seriously beaten by racist police officers for encouraging others to register to vote, who was brave enough to speak truth to racist power on a national platform despite only having a sixth grade education. The racist power that she spoke the truth to? Most Dopers were alive when these people were in power. This all happened in the 1960s.

Watch that documentary “Eyes on The Prize”. Many of the people who are narrating the footage are still alive. How much you wanna bet the people holding the dogs and the water cannons and the Conderate flags in that footage are still alive too?

Obama hasn’t done a single thing but expose the same attitudes and feelings that have always existed. Things have gotten better since the 60s. But we are still living in the wake of the Civil Rights movement.

15

No, the speech talks in the present tense, as if the post-racial America had already begun.

jEven if those things were caused primarily by racism, and racism disappeared, people are still going to complain. Witness the example in the OP, where some over-privileged TV producer cries racism because he matches a police report.

Or how relevant Eyes on the Prize is, because it is only fifty years old.

Regards,
Shodan

16

He’s using the past tense because … wait for it! … are you still waiting? I promise it’s worth it! … he’s talking about things that happened in the past. Specifically the actions of his grandparents and parents. This might become obvious to you if you read it in context. Four years later he gave another speech where he made it obvious he did not believe this was all in the past.

You would be right to say Obama played into a desire from Americans (mostly white) to heal past racial divides and achieve that kind of post-racial America. You are plainly and obviously wrong to say he asserted America had already achieved that post-racial state. This claim is so obviously wrong based on his own statements and actions that were is no reason to make it in the first place.

But they haven’t disappeared, so what difference does this make? Are you just dismissing all complaints about racism because some of them are presumably invalid?

17

My point was I think it goes a little deeper than that. If you go back to the 50’s and prior, not only would someone espouse racism towards a group, but they also practiced it to any individual member of that group who happened to be in front of them. Whether they knew them already or not. Today, someone would espouse this “group racism”, I mentioned earlier, but NOT to the individual in front of them. The one in front of them they would give a fair shake. Again, whether they know them or not.

I’m sure but in times past, they wouldn’t have been shy saying it anywhere.

18

I don’t feel comfortable asserting what happened in the '50s and earlier because I wasn’t there. But this feels like a naive oversimplification to me.

This, too- to an extent. I’ll agree that today most people realize that racism is frowned on and that fewer people felt that way in the past.

19

I think people had good manners in the 1950s, just as they do now. There were people in the 1950s who proclaimed themselves “colorblind”, just as there are plenty of people who do the same now. And as surely as those people were delusional back, they are still delusional.

I’m skeptical that someone could be racist about “groups” but not be prejudiced against individuals. It seems to me that a guy who believes that black people are nice enough, but they just aren’t as smart or responsible as white people, is not going to be willing to hire a black person or rent their house to one.

The majority of my coworkers are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. The majority of them are from the South. The majority of them attended racially segregated schools and were raised during a time period when whites and blacks did not commonly associate with each other as social equals. Almost all the black people who work in my building work in administrative positions. There are only a few of us who are employed as technical professionals and managers.

A person would have to be insane to think that all these patterns are not directly related to one another. Why are all the older black employees lowly-paid secretaries and all the younger black employees techies? Is it because we younger folks are just outliers? Or does it have something to do with the fact that we’re the first in our generation to be born legally free? When people are born free, they can do things that their imprisoned brethern can’t.

Some people look at this success and want to tie a pretty bow on everything and dust off their hands. While others, like myself, see the success as fragile–something that could be snatched away the moment the wrong people take over the reigns. Every time I enter the comment section of any online publication, I see these people. They aren’t trolls. They aren’t stupid teenagers. These are real people…people who are in positions of authority and power. A white person may able to laugh off a racist tirade, but for me, I often feel fear. Because for all I know, the person writing that shit is my boss. He may view me as one of the exceptions. Or he may not.

20

“Racism wouldn’t be a big problem if black people just stopped complaining about it!”